Watch SpaceX easily grab its nose fairing – BGR

• SpaceX launched 58 new Starlink satellites into Earth orbit last night and managed to grab one of its bonus nose fairings.
• Fairings cost up to $ 6 million each, so it’s a wise business decision to try and get them back when possible.
• SpaceX now has more than 650 Starlink satellites in orbit.

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SpaceX’s horde of Starlink satellites grew a bit larger on Tuesday with the successful launch of another Falcon 9 and the deployment of 58 new satellites into Earth orbit. The launch and deployment went off without a hitch and, as an added bonus, SpaceX was able to recover part of the nose of its rocket, which was a difficult thing for the company to achieve.

The two nose halves, called fairings, cover the cargo hold and fall back to Earth after the spacecraft reaches space and deploys whatever it is carrying. In a one-of-a-kind video posted by Elon Musk, the capture of the fairing was captured by a camera drone which provides us with stunning images.

As you can see in the video, the fairing was ripped off as it slowly descended towards the ocean. The boat with that huge net is called Ms. Tree, and SpaceX has two of those boats that it uses to try to grab the two halves of the nose when they come down.

Aloha, welcome back from space ? pic.twitter.com/xWPN09Wtaw

– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Aug 18, 2020

The video is pretty awesome, aside from some questionable background music, and it shows us the recovery process in a way we’ve never seen it before. In fact, the video makes the whole thing look pretty easy, which it sure isn’t.

SpaceX’s early efforts to reclaim its rocket fairings have yielded poor results. The shape of the fairings makes it incredibly difficult to predict how they will descend. They aren’t exactly aerodynamic, and SpaceX struggled for a long time, testing various configurations of chutes and nets until it stabilized on its current setup.

Even still, there’s no guarantee that the ships will catch noses when they return to Earth, and during yesterday’s launch the other half of the nose ended up in the ocean before another SpaceX spacecraft hit. get it back. Over time, the company gets better and better at positioning their boats and timing catches, but that’s still far from certain.

But why bother to catch the noses? SpaceX already regularly recovers and refurbishes its Falcon 9 booster, so why mess with noses too? Well, while they look like pretty simple pieces of hardware, they’re actually incredibly complex and expensive. Elon Musk claimed that the fairing halves cost around $ 6 million each, and their salvage and refurbishment was obviously much cheaper than making new ones.

Either way, the video is a treat, and it’s cool that SpaceX is so dedicated to showing off its accomplishments. It just means cooler stuff for the rest of us to watch.